The concept of dual booting operating systems never appealed to me. Thats precisely why I had Vista RC1 running as a single OS on my home machine, in the raw state that it was, sometimes consuming 55% Cpu when idle for no obvious reason.

Enough was enough. Its now happened. I’ve rolled back from Windows Vista RC1 to Windows XP. The reasoning was simple. I’ll upgrade to Vista eventually this year. Vista RC1 and for that matter, every Vista beta, was the most ‘feature packed’ flavour of Vista, Windows Vista Ultimate. However, for my purposes, Vista Home Premium seems more than enough. Here comes the catch now. I cannot upgrade to Vista final edition from RC1, since I’d be buying Home premium, and was running an evaluation version of Vista Ultimate. Besides, there were a few partition issues, as Windows Vista demands a 15gb partition at least. Since my primary DOS partition is 10gb and the 4 others are about 45gb, there was issues from ground up. So, a few forum searches later, the unanimous conclusion was install XP, buy Vista upgrade edition and voila, I’d have Windows Vista. Set about doing step 1, installing XP; backing up firefox profile, checking for driver setup dumps and the likes.

And then, Insert Windows XP Cd. Click around the initial crap. Enter Serial key and all the mundane things you do before installing Windows. Seventeen, yes, seventeen minutes later, a shiny new Windows XP greeted me. A few driver installations later, XP, as I wanted it to be. And then I noticed things I’d almost forgotten was possible on my PC.

Bootup Time - 10 seconds.
Remote of TV tuner card - working again.
WidComm bluetooth stack - Working again.
Scanner drivers - accepted.
Nokia PC suite - perfect.
No User Account Control - yay!
Millions of tiny problems with Vista - vanished. Windows XP coffee maker - Serving warm coffee again. :p.

In short, everything was again working as it should be.

Then the thundebolt of a thought. Why would I now want to install Vista? Maybe I should, because I’m too used to transparent stuff now (pun not intended) . Maybe I should stop acting like a wimp and look for 3rd party apps that do the job on Windows XP itself and not buy Vista.

All in all, very confused now. Some clarity maybe, after people actually start using Vista? Or will they? Wait and watch..

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